There’s the young lady who left home because of her mother’s incessant drug use. There’s the young man who left home at age 11, four years after the death of his father. Why? “My mother hated me because I reminded her of him.”

Then there’s Cecil, a survivor of childhood sexual abuse who left home at age 14, as Los Angeles-based filmmaker Romiti Rainwater tells it, “because I was tired of sleeping with my father.”

They are some of the faces and voices behind “Lost in America,” an ambitious project to raise awareness and put on film the plight of some of the estimated hundreds of thousands youths and young adults who go homeless each year in America.

Now I just saw a fun flick, “Guardians of the Galaxy,” last weekend. It cost $170 million to make and already had grossed $160 million worldwide within days of its premiere. In contrast, Rainwater and his cohorts believe it will take a modest-by-comparison $150,000 to complete their project and debut it by next year.

Of course, it won’t be a box-office blockbuster because of its dark subject matter. But this is the kind of thought-provoking film we need to support and see more of; it tackles a serious, often-ignored subject that takes place daily on the streets of our neighborhood and city.

A VETERAN, HOMELESS AT 19

The National Alliance to End Homelessness estimates that 550,000 unaccompanied, single youth and young adults up to age 24 annually experience a homelessness episode of longer than one week. Roughly 380,000 of those youth are younger than 18. Too many engage in survival sex, are sexually exploited, or fall victim to substance abuse, among other street perils. The group also estimates that 5,000 unaccompanied youths die each year as a result of assault, illness, or suicide.

“We are doing a series of vignettes, short little pieces, Michael Moore-style, because the best way to move people is letting these kids tell their own stories,” said Rainwater, 42, whose fictional film of a homeless teenager last year, “Sugar,” was shown to Congress and won the “Film Heals” award at the Manhattan Film Festival.

Rainwater knows a bit about living on the streets. An only child and Navy veteran, Rainwater obtained a general discharge at 19 after he learned his mother was diagnosed with lung cancer and placed in a long-term hospital setting in Orlando, Fla. His mother had long lost her rented apartment by the time he got to her bedside, and his maternal grandmother, his other closest relative, refused to take him in.

“She had issues with my mother because my mother had abused alcohol and prescription drugs, and she was angry I had left the military to care for my mother,” he said last week. “She told me they served split-pea soup at the nearest homeless shelter.”

CALLING THE COPS ON A HOMELESS JESUS

Jobless while caring for his mother in a hospice, he slept in his car, under highway overpasses and on a pier at a nearby lake where he once fished as a kid. He also slept in a public park where he could see his grandmother’s condo. He left for Los Angeles nine months later to pursue his dream to become a filmmaker after his mother went into remission. But she relapsed and died three years later.

He raised $50,000 through word of mouth, indiegogo.com, an online fundraising site, and donations from a few investors. He and a three-member crew have so far filmed 12 homeless youths of diverse backgrounds and circumstances, as well as shelter and homeless-youth advocacy groups.

They shot a 19-year-old living in a homeless shelter in rural Vermont and ate a meal that cost $2.14, made by a chef of some fame at a food kitchen for the homeless in Manhattan. The crew also spoke to a minister and visited a church “where they have a sculpture of Jesus laying on a bench, covered in a blanket,” Rainwater wrote in a blog on his website.

“And we found out that people thought it was a homeless person, so they did they logical thing. … They called the police,” he added.

With more funding, Rainwater plans to chronicle the travels of a freight-train hopping homeless teen and visit North Dakota, Chicago and several other locations in the Midwest.

I suggested a stop in the Gopher State. According to a 2009 Wilder Research report, roughly 2,500 youths ages 16 to 21 are homeless on any given night in the state. Social service agencies in the Twin Cities area have expanded homeless-youth programs and emergency shelter beds in recent years, including a proposed $9 million, 44-unit housing development for homeless youth in St. Paul.

“Maybe we can go there,” said Rainwater, who pledged to raise the remaining $100,000 “by hook or crook.”

Perhaps they should add the word “Guardians” to the working title to get the funds flowing. Just a thought.

DETAILS

From smoking crack in a Harlem drug den for a front-page exposé to covering the deaths of 86 people in a Bronx social club fire, Rubén Rosario spent 11 years as a writer for the New York Daily News before joining the Pioneer Press in 1991 as special correspondent and city editor. He launched his award-winning column in 1997. He is by far the loudest writer in the newsroom over the phone.

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